511–520 of 523 posts
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LLMs are linguistic mirrors, after all.
We have no idea what they are. Their emergent properties remain unexplained, so soundbites like "linguistic mirror" are like saying "brains are organs, after all".
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> A corporation has the right to put out whatever message it likes, because its owners have that right. This is often threatened. I think it would be that bad if a corporation didn't have some of those rights. For example, one difference between a corporation and a person, is that a corporation is for profit. A corporation is also potentially much more powerful than a person (in how far-rereaching it can get, how pow…
In this jurisdiction, you don’t lose your rights (e.g. to free speech) because you also pursue profit.
Even if corporations had no right to speech whatsoever (total imposed silence), their owner still fully enjoy their rights and have the same precise rights to free speech as those who don't own anything.
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Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets multi-person groups neatly fit in existing laws that might discuss individuals. Corporations like Citizens United ca…
> Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. One does not really follow from another. Washing machines are also "owned by humans" but they don't get rights. > Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....
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The problem seems to be with defining good tests for intelligence. FWIW, because GPT4 answers have a detectable pattern, they should presumably fail the Turing test. At some level, intelligence requires logic, rationality, and conceptualization, all of which are topics which have evaded clear definition despite millennia of philosophy directly addressing the issues.
When you say we need ‘good’ tests for intelligence, you mean ‘tests that humans can pass but machines can’t’. You’re demanding this because you aren’t comfortable with the implication that a computer can pass our existing tests for intelligence, so you rationalize that with the comforting thought that those tests were not meant to identify intelligence. Tests like the SAT or the bar exam or AP English. Or tests for t…
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What would it mean for an algorithm to experience color, sound, pain? There's no need to bring souls into it. That's a religious straw man. We know we do experience the world through sensory sensations, and those also make up our thoughts, memories and dreams. What we don't know is how our understanding of the physical world can possibly create those sensations, since we model the world as abstract mathematical patte…
I'm not talking about souls! What the heck is that anyways. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that our understanding of how physical systems work (neurons and all that) give us no understanding of why we need to experience things. We could have worked just fine without it (again, see the hard problem of consciousness). So I assert that AI would function perfectly just fine without subjective feeling as well, and we wou…
Our curiosity, emotions and creativity are the result of our evolutionary process and nothing more. Saying that all of these things can't be experienced by some future machine is just human exceptionalism.
Perhaps there really are quantum tubules in our heads, but then we can still use the same effect inside a machine brain. We're just conscious, loving, dreaming meat lmao. (Terry Bisson)
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One smart ape once said: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence The burden of proof is on you, and so far you produced nothing of value in that regard
The burden of proof is always on whomever is making a claim. I didn't claim transformer systems were like the brain, I simply showed the mistakes behind the arguments claiming the opposite, by showing how transformer systems could work like the brain.
Yes, you in that case, you said "ie. this is what the brain does."
We don't know "what the brain does", so you can't make this claim
GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…
> It solves complex problems of symbol manipulation and logic no, it solves the assumed-to-be complex problem of constructing probable and believable text given a prompt.
What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fac…
I love how the top three comments have nothing to do with the article. What about data dignity or provenance?
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> We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. To solve ourselves is to know ourselves completely, and to know ourselves completely is to be honest in who and why we are what we are simultaneously across all persons. It assumes perfect knowledge. There is no statistical approximation nor computational power which can do this. > People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an…
That's been solved long ago. To know anything (an X) completely you need perfect knowledge. Hence people come up with a set of simplified ways of reasoning about X. They call this a model of X. Model is incomplete and so primitive, so dumbed down, that we manage to play it forward/backward in our heads or our computers. If a model checks out with the real outcomes we proudly exclaim that we understand X. I'm not bein…
Agreed.
> Hence people come up with a set of simplified ways of reasoning about X. They call this a model of X.
A "set of simplified ways of reasoning about X" in order to create a "model of X" does not imply complete understanding. Quite the contrary actually.
To wit, science often models current understanding of a phenomenon. When new evidence (understanding) is discovered, the model is updated to account for it. Sometimes this invalidates the original model, often the model is refined. Either way, progress is made with the tacit agreement that the model may change in the future.
> If a model checks out with the real outcomes we proudly exclaim that we understand X.
Again, this does not support the assertion of "That's been solved long ago." If anything, it affirms there is justification for disagreeing with the original premise to which I responded:
> We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves.